Reteaming with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Christopher Nolan’s long-delayed Tenet proves yet again that the director knows the value of collaborating with a maestro of motion picture photography. It would be difficult to talk about Tenet without paying homage to van Hoytema, just as it would be difficult to talk about it without noting its various release date pushbacks due to the shuttering of movie theaters thanks to COVID-19. The fact that Warner Bros. chose to hold out, unlike, say, Disney with Mulan, for releasing it in all of its 70mm glory–as it should be seen–is a testament to some in the film industry still not ready to give up on the old school model in favor of surrendering completely to video on demand. And then, of course, the studio is probably naively hoping to recoup its cost (without charging $30 to buy it on a streaming platform), for once dispensing with the “America First” philosophy of movie releases and distributing it first in Europe and the UK (not part of Europe, just as they wanted). And maybe it was kismet that it should be this way, for Tenet is very much a European movie. After all, you can take the Brit out of Britain and put him in Los Angeles, but he’ll always know which continent holds the most beauty.
So it is also fitting that amid these travel ban and travel phobic times, the narrative structure of Tenet should take us on a geographical safari that lets us feel both a pang of yearning while also getting as close as possible to experiencing the majesty of a setting like the Amalfi. It is as though Nolan wants to reward our eyes in some way as he proceeds to trompe l’oeil in his usual Inception meets The Prestige manner from the very start of the film. Another all too tailored to the times aspect of Tenet is the fact that in order to function in the world while inverted, one must wear an oxygen mask (it all looks très Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, but also, obviously like some of what humans have been subjected to in their current surgical mask guise).
But back to the travel agent abilities of Nolan–we begin in Ukraine, with The Protagonist (John David Washington, best known for Black KkKlansman) on a mission to procure an object at an opera house where a mass shooting is in process. There seems less concern for the patrons involved (though The Protagonist’s side is careful to gas them all to mitigate some of the anxiety and chaos) and more for getting to that object before the others do.
The Russians (always the fucking Russians, eh?), realizing they’ve been duped by The Protagonist’s operation, end up capturing and killing his entire team. Before they can do the same to him, The Protagonist manages to regain access to a suicide pill (would that we could all have such convenient access to one, to be honest). But The Protagonist is nowhere near dead, waking up on a boat to find he’s been rescued by his own CIA brethren after the pill induced a coma, and viewed as more loyal than ever for not talking. He is then given a new mission and a code name to wield among the appropriate circles: tenet. Synonyms for such being a credo, conviction or doctrine. What The Protagonist is soon about to find out is that there are two factions with their own separate tenet, one might say. And the diametrical opposition between these two sides–present and future–could lead to both World War III and the end of the world.
With 2020 seeing a renewed interest in the likes of Watchmen, Dark and The Umbrella Academy–all narratives which showcase both the Gordian knot of time travel, complete with its bootstrap paradoxes, and the imminent apocalypse–Tenet proves no exception to the trend, regardless of Nolan beginning work on the project years ago (with a total of five years put into writing the script). So it is that in this time travel story, we’re additionally reminded of the grandfather paradox (something Marty McFly also had to contend with in Back to the Future–and hey, plutonium is significant in Tenet as well). Explained to us by Neil (Robert Pattinson), The Protagonist’s “handler,” it reminds us that “inconsistencies emerge through changing the past.”
To drive home just how dramatic these changes can be, the analogy of a person going back in time to kill their grandfather is used to illustrate that, in doing so, the person in question would cease to exist by stamping out a progenitor. Yet this is the risk that the future generation is willing to take, for it is they who have come up with the technology to use–via the wonders of entropy–inverted time and objects (bullets chief among them) within it to wipe out their forebears in order to have a fighting chance for themselves, environmentally. For yes, the other topical trend in film and television (with The Day After Tomorrow blazing the trail) is our doomed future at our own hands, and as we willfully ignore the facts of climate change presented to us daily (most recently, the double hurricane of the Gulf Coast and the intense barrage of California wildfires).
The conduit for this new version of a nuclear arms race is Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a diabolical Russian (because, again, as The Red Sparrow also recently iterated, all Russians are diabolical) married to Katherine “Kat” Sator (Elizabeth Debicki, the Joely Richardson meets Saoirse Ronan look-alike who has been rising to prominence since appearing in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby). Indeed, her English pedigree is what drew him to her initially, wanting the prestige of the hoity-toity British upper crust (what Michael Caine, in his brief appearance as an MI6 agent, calls the “controlling interest” the British have in snobbery) to move within the circles he needs to. But now, as any affection for him she might have had wanes, he decides no one can have her (least of all The Protagonist, so clearly allured by that white pussy). Just as he has decided that because he is dying, no one else can have the world. It must end with him. So there’s his interest in collaborating with the future generation to make their own aims come true.
Considering Tenet is very much Nolan’s “Bond movie,” it only makes sense that one of its most important settings to the plot–where Andrei engages in his first nuclear deal–is the secret Russian town also alluded to in Die Another Day (even if it is generally viewed as the worst Bond film, it has its moments). Hidden from the map and named clandestinely in numerical terms, the town was where massive nuclear fallout occurred (presumably modeled after the Siberian milieu near Mayak, the birthplace of the USSR’s nuclear arms program). With the fall of the Soviet Union, the uncertainty of the nuclear arms race’s future was capitalized upon by Andrei, who made his wealth quickly by picking up the scraps that others were afraid to. And yes, he has all the trappings of a great Bond villain. As a spy movie, again van Hoytema’s slick cinematography skills come into play (this is the man who did Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, after all), lighting the mood with the ominous shadows of subterfuge and brightening it during action sequences (of which there are plenty, including the high-octane shots of the SailGP F50 during the Amalfi segment).
The slow burn of a revelation on the part of The Protagonist regarding just, who, exactly, is in charge of this operation is ultimately worth the two and a half hour build toward it. One in which we, as the audience, are forced to reconcile that if our successors in inhabiting the Earth ever did have the technology to seek vengeance upon us, we would be absolutely fucked. For if you were a climate refugee making your way through the wasteland of the planet’s barren rivers, wouldn’t you, too, want to come for the dolts that begat this? As Andrei says at one point, “The greatest sin I ever committed was bringing a son into this world knowing it was ending.” Indeed, it’s everyone’s sin more than ever at this juncture, when propagation seems a laughable enterprise only further mounting the issue at hand.
As Nolan takes us on this incredible, often mind-bending journey, he gets his undercutting message across, which is the tagline itself: “Time runs out.” The question is not if, but when. We in the present generation seem to be banking on the fact that we won’t be alive when the true fallout occurs. But the accumulating evidence around us reveals otherwise. We are already at the beginning stages of the point of no return (especially with what we can now dub “COVID-19 ocean waste”). Tenet, therefore, serves as the environmentalist Bond film that the Bond franchise could never execute. Your move, No Time to Die.
